Under the above caption I would like to reply on my own account, to Kuehn’s comment on a joint letter (not really meant for publication) of Mrs. Holmes and myself, in May 25 issue of INSTEAD OF A MAGAZINE.

I will begin by quoting the closing words of our letter to comrade Kuehn: Without the masses you can do nothing. Friend Kuehn side-steps this contention when he challenges us to cite some examples of the contributions made by the masses to such intellectual progress as has been achieved. Of course we cannot do it. But we don’t have to, for we made no such claim. We did not say without the masses there can be no thinking, no inventing, no intellectual progress. The very fact that we dubbed them the numbskull masses should have convinced our friend that we looked for no intellectual achievements from such a quarter; but I beg to observe that in the evolution of hte race something more than the exercise of intellect has been required. Is it not so? Surely the careful student of history will require no citations to prove the contention that it requires a general movement of the people—the masses—to inaugurate and put in operation any great change in the body politic. A revolution may be conceived and planned by a few men, but a few men, without the assistance of the masses cannot carry the plan into execution. An idea of intellectual progress conceived by one man, or a few, is first regarded as a dream; held by a few more, as a crazy notion; by a respectable minority, as a dangerous heresy; but when accepted and put in operation by the masses (and don’t forget that it takes the masses to put it in operation) it becomes eminently proper and right. In other words, the masses first oppose ideas of intellectual progress, and end by accepting them; and it is their acceptance by the masses that make such ideas powerful factors in the evolution of the race. Hence our contention Without the masses you can DO nothing. Anarchistic ideas, while held by a mere handful of the human race, remain an impractical ideal — a beautiful dream — nothing more. If they should ever be embraced by the masses (and not until then) they will supplant the existing order by becoming the rule of human conduct.

All that history records may be set at naught by the events of tomorrow says Friend Kuehn. True, we might witness overnight a complete transformation of ideas and character, a la H. G. Wells’ story In the Days of The Comet, but in the nature of things we don’t look for such a happy culmination; and it is highly probable that any change which may come to society will be brought about in the future as in the past: by slow and painful degrees, when the numbskull masses shall, by the trend of events, have been forced to adopt it.

In this connection may I be permitted to heap a few coals of fire on the head of our critic, Austin W. Wright, most of whose articles in INSTEAD OF A MAGAZINE I read with much pleasure. I was especially interested in his dreamy fragment and in the article on What Is Property? In the latter he very sensibly makes the assertion that: If it is wrong that land parcels should be individually owned, it is wrong that there should be individual ownership of any want-satisfying instrument whatsoever, because, if the value of land parcels as economic quantities is due to the presence of population, by the same token all value is due to the same cause. This is a nut I would like to see cracked by some able-bodied single-taxer. As to Wright’s dreamy fragment in which he unhorses me from my steed of alleged patronizing tolerance in order that he may mount and overwhelm me with the same charger, let me say that if I unwittingly assumed such an attitude in our joint private letter to comrade Kuehn, I ask his pardon, and no one else need take offence. I believe our friend Kuehn has known me too long and too well to impute to me any such motive. I am only sixty-four years old and I don’t pretend to know it all yet.